Tuesday 1 October 2013 13.40 EDT
First published on Tuesday 1 October 2013 13.40 EDT

It is difficult to write rationally about the shutdown of the US government, because it is not a rational act.

In a way, the job of pundits would be easier if there was a money trail to follow – or even some specific political beneficiary to the massive meltdown of governance and order that's occurred over the past few days (if not months, if not years). When congressional Republicans caved to the wishes of the National Rifle Association, it made a certain craven sense: the NRA pumps almost $20m into their campaign coffers; of course they'll do what they say. When Republicans push anti-reproductive rights legislation, it's easily traced to a fundamental strand of condescension to and mistrust of women (or most generously, a confusion about them).

Indeed, even the Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act has the clean logic of tit-for-tat. The GOP caters to big business' best interest, and they opposed ACA because of it interferes with the insurance companies' desire to keep operating as they have in the past: doling our healthcare with an eye toward profits and not healthcare. (That Obamacare doesn't actually fix that problem so much as ameliorate it (for now) is a topic for another day. (That Obamacare may actually benefit most businesses is a topic that for the day after.)

The GOP's intransigence over these political stands, whatever you think of them as ideological positions, stems from simple political debts and selfish political goals. Conversely, policy positions that stem mostly from ideology or even practical knowledge of the problem at hand have some inherent flexibility; you can reason with people who have arrived at their position through reason. If your main goal is to solve a real-world problem, you can make concessions based on new real-world data. When policy goals are held largely for political reasons, only political arguments can move you.

I think this explains the relative give of the White House's positions – up until now – in these budget showdowns. Obama and his allies have compromised because they have some idea of the real-world consequences of not compromising, and they want to avoid those consequences more than they want to avoid political costs of not compromising. The GOP has cared only about political costs. And this, again, made a kind of sense – if you believed that the GOP had more to gain, electorally speaking, from "standing up to Obama" than contributing to a functioning government

In other budget showdowns of the past year, the GOP could produce shreds of evidence for this belief: Obama's job approval rating sank to record lows during those negotiations; and the frenzied support of the far right for their efforts produced the illusion of popular will. Something changed between then and now: it largely stems from Democrats – and the White House, specifically – running the math again on political-versus-real-world-consequences and deciding that to keep making acceptable political compromises would eventually undermine their desire to avoid unacceptable real-world consequences. As one friend of mine in the administration put it:

We backed up into the edge of the abyss, looked into it, and decided we never wanted to look at it again.

It is the logic that undergirds any decision not to negotiate with terrorists.

From the outside, it may look as though the White House has taken its own craven political path, that the president's refusal to negotiate comes from a desire for short-term political gain. But here's the thing: how can you consider that position cynical when it is the position shared by the vast majority of the American people? (72%, at last count.) Sure, the Obama administration stands to benefit politically from the perception that the Republicans have recklessly and selfishly, if not cruelly, decided to shut down the government.

But here's why they stand to benefit: no one besides a small faction of the GOP congressional caucus (30, to be exact) wants to shut it down. While there are special interest groups (such as the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, and FreedomWorks) that have urged Republicans to use a government shutdown as leverage, their advocacy has a important and cynical twist: their real goal is to disrupt the implementation of Obamacare; that is, supposedly, the payment they want for taking the entire federal government hostage.

They have presumed that Obamacare is so politically unpopular, it was worth the potential political cost of a shutdown. This is simply, demonstrably, verifiably, obviously not true. (polling, lots of polling, on this.) Anyone in the GOP who believes it is, to coin a phrase, is high on their own supply. The GOP, as a national party, will suffer because of this insanity. Poll after poll after poll shows this. Most Republican congressmen realize this! John McCain, whose head is going to explode very soon, himself tweeted a link to one such poll.

And as soon as it became clear that a shutdown was more politically costly than the political benefits of blocking Obamacare – which was weeks ago – that small minority of GOP representatives who are pushing the whole caucus rightward should have been shut down themselves. That they weren't, that Speaker Boehner continues to cave – or has been, by some accounts, trapped by a statement he made three years ago – is a mystery to me.

Other rational explanations – that they want to turn brinksmanship into standard operating procedure on the Hill, that they are worried about "being primaried from the right" – pale in the face of the real-world tragedy of a shutdown and the clear political cost.

Reports that congressmen have been drinking during these, ahem, "deliberations" have gotten a lot of criticism and a lot of attention. It is, however, the only way their behavior makes sense.